No Silent Hill HD patch for 360 users

The Silent Hill HD collection was released earlier this year, and as a fan of the 2nd and 3rd in the series of Silent Hill I found myself to be rather excited about the prospect of reliving some of my favourite gaming moments in shiny, high definition.

Sadly, the refresh was not quite what everyone had been waiting for, and in fact left many fans of the series greatly disappointed with the quality of the update. A mixture of different issues such as poor visuals, audio stuttering and even worse, poor frame rate.

Now, considering these two games were released on a lesser platform a number of years ago, I find it hard to believe that we can actually be looking at these sort of issues; new art assets and porting aside. These problems earned the game mixed reviews, but for the most part it was met with disappointment.

All seemed like it was going to get turned around with the introduction of a patch. Last month the PS3 received the update to the game, and this has had a positive effect on some of the issues found in the release. However, when were the Xbox 360 players going to get their update? Konami advised that it was on its way, but now things have changed.

Konami are now changing their tune and have issued a statement confirming that they will not be patching the Xbox 360 version of the game. What could the excuse be? Well, it sounds a little generic, but they have decided to go with “technical issues and resources”. Say what you will; this is nothing but a kick in the teeth to the fans who supported the release on Xbox 360. I could understand the decision not to patch the game at all before I accept any reason to punish a particular user base.

Not quite contempt at delivering that bit of shock news to the fans, Konami then went on to state that the issues the game were suffering from was all down to the port being derived from unfinished code. The game’s original art director, Masahiro Ito, was even reduced to describing the version of the game as “poor”.

It is difficult to say whether the issue here has to do with the patch not being given to the Xbox users, or the fact that the game was released in the state it was in the first place. Online patching has given developers an easy out for issues found in games, and despite my reluctance to believe it, has in some cases lead to lazy development. This debacle screams of it.

Although at the moment we can’t be sure who is actually to blame for the lack of a patch, we can still place the blame squarely with Konami for bringing such a poorly put-together game to market.